This is wonderfully demented: Steve, a programmer with Sim Slice, has released Slice City — a version of Sim City which is played inside The Sims. As Boing Boing notes, “that means that your simulated people can simulate being the mayor of a simulated city.”

Just like in The Sims, attention to detail breeds success and reward, while inattention breeds disaster.

“The Sims must routinely refurbish the buildings to keep the citizens happy, or just let them deteriorate and force the citizens to become unhappy and move away,” says Alvey. “Happy citizens go to work and pay taxes, which the Sims collect as revenue. The higher the profits, the more attractive the city becomes, so more citizens will move into it.”

Worlds within worlds within worlds. I love how Slice City riffs off the old science-fiction conceit, in which a scientist peers into a microscope and discovers a tiny civilization at atomic size. Then the camera zooms waaaaaay out and — whoa! — you see that the scientist is himself part of an atomic-scale civilization being peered at by another, huger scientist, who is himself being peered at in turn by another … and so on, and so on.

Recursion is one of the neatest and freakiest intellectual concepts there is.